Best Hannibal Murders

Hannibal's 10 Most Spectacularly Gruesome Murders

With NBC deciding not to recommission the baroque serial killer thriller, tonight (Sky Living, Wednesday at 10pm) could be the last ever episode of Hannibal. And unless another channel steps into save the Dr Lecter prequel series, it ends on quite a bang. No spoilers, naturally, so let’s just sit back celebrate and relive the show’s 10 most spectacularly gruesome murders. Enjoy your lunch!

Don’t be so judgey (season 2, episode 3)

When our anti-hero, troubled FBI profiler Will Graham (Hugh Dancy), was put on trial for murder, Hannibal (Mads Mikkelsen) manufactured a mis-trial by grisly means. First he sent a severed ear in the post. Then he killed the court bailiff and mounted his body on a stag's head. The pièce de résistance came when the judge was found brutally murdered and displayed in the courtroom, with – sound the heavy-handed symbolism klaxon – his heart and brain on a set of scales.

Nurse! The screens! (season 1, episode 6)

When hammy psycho Dr Abel Gideon (Eddie Izzard) escaped from Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, he imitated the Chesapeake Ripper by impaling a nurse on several medical instruments. We’ve gone right off the idea of a shish kebab for dinner.

Load of old pony (season 2, episode 8)

The series strayed dangerously close to over-the-top surreal comedy with this turducken-style slaughter, in which a live bird was placed in the chest cavity of a murder victim , who was in turn sewn inside a dead horse’s uterus. Which is nice.

Cello, is it me you’re looking for? (season 1, episode 8)

So obsessed was this serial killer with musical perfection that he punished one of the less talented members of the Baltimore Orchestra by opening his throat, shoving a cello neck down through his mouth and powdering his vocal chords so that the corpse could actually be played with a bow. The murderer turned out to be one of Lecter’s patients, “serenading” the doctor. As you do.

You’re all heart (season 3, episode 1)

Posing as an academic in Florence, Hannibal fed both Gideon (Izzard) and his lover-cum-hostage Bedelia Du Maurier (Gillian Anderson) on oysters, acorns and sweet wine to enhance their flavour for when he later planned to eat them. Charming. When a poet worked out what Lecter was up to, he killed him, travelled cross country with the corpse in a trunk and mounted his dismembered torso on broadswords in the Norman Chapel, Palermo, to resemble a gigantic heart.

Best thing since sliced dead (season 2, episode 5)

When one of the wise-cracking FBI geeks, Agent Beverly Katz, became a victim of Hannibal herself, he displayed her corpse like a twisted art installation. Poor Bev’s body was drained, frozen, meticulously sliced into vertical pieces with an industrial saw and stuck inside glass compartments, like some kind of Damien Hirst or Gunther Von Hagens creation.

Pillar of the community (season 1, episode 9)

Perhaps the show’s sickest tableau yet was this insane 40ft human totem pole discovered on a beach, made up of freshly exhumed corpses. The work of a serial killer who’d been at large for years (Lance Henriksen from Aliens), the bodies ranging from freshly killed to decades old. Wanting to get caught and imprisoned, he built it as testament to his life's work.

Eye of a killer (season 2, episode 2)

Another sicko art installation. A kidnap victim awoke to discover that his naked body has been sewn into a gigantic human mural – a silo full of intertwining dead bodies, preserved, painted and stitched together in a collage so that when viewed from above, they looked like a human eye. Lecter worked it all out, killed the arty murderer and promptly added him to his own mural.

Fun guy (season 1, episode 2)

In a storyline reminiscent of a CSI gardening spin-off, the killer in the second ever episode was a pharmacist who buried his diabetic victims alive and used their bodies as fertiliser to grow mushrooms. Turns out he was obsessed with the similarities between the structures of fungi and the human mind. Oh, that’s OK then.

A wing and a prayer (season 1, episode 5)

A murdered couple were found in a motel room, posed in praying positions with the skin on their backs flayed open and strung to the ceiling to give them the appearance of wings. It turned out the killer was dying of brain cancer, saw “demons” everywhere, so transformed his victims into guardian angels to watch over him, because he was scared of dying in his sleep. Understandable.